Slavery | Constitution 101

0:00[Music] in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that define the American creed we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and yet Jefferson himself was and enslaver he held more than 600 people in bondage over the course of his life he publicly denounced slavery calling it a moral depravity a hideous blot and a practice that violated the laws of nature and yet even as he called for the total emancipation of enslaved people Jefferson like many of his fellow Virginia Slave holders such as George Mason and James Madison would not free the people that he himself held in bondage how did Jefferson reconcile the founding Creed of America with the story of slavery in America the truth is that he didn't Jefferson always recognized slavery as a violation of the principles of natural law that were

1:20expounded in the Declaration of Independence indeed he said I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just that his Justice cannot sleep for forever that's from the notes of the state on Virginia where he endorsed total emancipation he said the spirit of the master is abating that of the slave rising from the dust his condition mollifying the way I hope preparing under the opes of Heaven for a total emancipation in fact Jefferson's favorite law professor George wi practiced as well as preaching the principles of natural Justice he not only emancipated all of the people he helped in bondage during lifetime but also made arrangements for their support and livelihood George Washington provided in his will that all the people that he enslaved should be freed on the death of his wife and at the same time other enslaving Founders from Virginia such as Madison Mason and Jefferson

2:16maintained this hypocritical position where they professed a desire for the abolition of slavery in theory but refused even after death to free their own enslaved population in practice so what can only be called the hypocrisy of Jefferson M Madison and Mason in contrast to the more principled conduct of Washington George wiff and Benjamin Franklin who by the end of his life came to support total emancipation the self-evident explanation is greed to put it simply Jefferson was insincere about slavery because of his avarice he enjoyed the lifestyle that enslaved labor made possible and he was unwilling to give it up and in moments of self-awareness some of the enslaving founders were candid about about their hypocrisy on the question of slavery consider Patrick Henry who so memorably declared Give me liberty or give me death is it not amazing Henry asked that at a time when the rights of humanity

3:12are defined and understood with Precision in a country above all others fond of Liberty we find men adopting a principle of slavery as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty that's Henry writing in 1773 and he added would anyone believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase I am drawn Along by the general inconvenience of living without them I will not I cannot justify today we'll talk about how those who fought to end slavery rooted their own Crusade for emancipation in the inspiring words of the Declaration itself calling on their fellow Americans to live up to the best ideals of the Declaration 's promise of freedom and equality and we'll talk about how the promise of the Declaration was resurrected by Lincoln at Gettysburg enshrined in the Constitution after the Civil War thwarted again after reconstruction and resurrected Once More

4:15by Dr King on the mall all right let's go back to January 1777 that's when Prince Hall a free African-American in Boston offered a petition for freedom to the Massachusetts house on behalf of seven African-Americans and the petition quoted the Declaration of Independence uh calling on the Massachusetts legislature to abolish slavery as a violation of principles of natural equality this is Prince Hall your petitioners apprehend that they have in common with all other men unnatural and inalienable right to that freedom which the great parent of the universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever Prince Hall wrote Massachusetts highest court would go on to declare slavery unconstitutional in 1783 one of the most powerful voices for this inspiring vision was Frederick Douglas himself with his famous speech what to a slave is the 4th of July

5:13Douglas was born and enslaved human being in Maryland later escaping into freedom and emerging as one of the leading abolitionist voices in the 19th century and he gave this speech on Independence Day for the Rochester anti-slavery selling Society in 1852 it became one of Douglas's most famous speeches criticized the chasm between America's founding principles and the institution of slavery let's walk through this inspiring speech together Douglas began by asking his audience to put themselves in his shoes as a formally enslaved person what to the American slave is your fourth of July he asked I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross Injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim the Declaration of Independence had asserted that all men are created equal but that promise was inconsistent Douglas said with the reality of chatt

6:13slavery I will not enlarge further on your National inconsistencies Douglas said the existence of slavery in this country Brands your republicanism a sham your Humanity a base pretense and your Christianity a lie nevertheless Douglas denied that the constitution itself was proslavery when James Madison's notes were published in 1840 Douglas read Madison's declaration that the framers had refused to enshrine into the Constitution what Madison called a right to property in men and Douglas said when he read those words that transformed his own conception of himself as a man and as a citizen and Douglas challenged many of his own abolitionist friends to reject a pro-slavery reading of the Constitution here's Douglas fellow citizens there's no matter in respect to which the people of the north have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon as that of

7:13the pro-slavery character of The Constitution he challenged them to read the constitution in a way that advanced the cause of Freedom this is Douglas in that instrument the Constitution I hold there is neither warrant license nor sanction of the hateful thing but interpreted as it ought to be interpreted the Constitution is a glorious Liberty document in Douglas's view slavery was inconsistent with the preamble to the Constitution and its core purposes here's Douglas again now take the Constitution according to its plain reading and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it on the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery and finally Douglas called on the nation to vindicate the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to abolish slavery the arm of the Lord is not shortened and the

8:11Doom of slavery is certain he declared while drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence the great principles it contains and the genius of American institutions my spirit is also cheered by the obvious Tendencies of the age well let's now review the history of slavery from the founding through the abolition of slavery after the Civil War which culminated in the ratification of the 13th 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution making Douglas's dream a reality and culminating in what some have called the second founding slavery is older of course than the US Constitution and was written into colonial law as early as the 1660s in places like Virginia and the Carol by the 1700s these Colonial slave codes transformed slavery itself making it inheritable in other words it was passed down from parent to child and was a lifelong condition based on race this

9:13was known as chatt slavery and it represented a fundamental shift in how the institution of slavery worked in the 1700s chatt slavery expanded and it became a massive part of the Southern population and white Southern wealth with the signing of the Declaration of Independence slavery clearly clashed with the founding ideals of America and it became a central issue at the Constitutional Convention what role did slavery play there all told 25 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional uh convention were enslavers and slavery was critical to many of their wealth and to the economies of their home States at the Constitutional Convention as Frederick Doug later emphasized the framers refused to recognize an explicit right of property in men however they did compromise over the issue of slavery and their debates were Central the main Clash was

10:15between the delegates who are willing to end the international slave trade which included most of them and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and in fact it was South Carolina and Georgia according to to George Mason that insisted on putting a time limit on the point at which Congress could ban slave trade and said that it couldn't be banned until 1808 and that was the first Central compromise that was made and Mason was appalled by it and after the convention he wrote to Thomas Jefferson and objective that the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia had prevented the immediate ending of the international slave trade which Jefferson and Mason and uh most of the other Ates viewed as a clear violation of national rights and then there was the 3- fifths Clause the US House of Representatives draws up districts based on a state population the more populace the state the greater

11:12number of districts it gets the big question in the debate was how to count enslaved people when setting the number of representatives in the US House at the convention proslavery Southerners argued that enslaved people should count as a full person but anti-slavery delegates shouted ocracy Pennsylvania delegate Governor Morris called slavery a nefarious institution The Curse Of Heaven on the states where it prevailed so how could Southern delegates treat enslave people as full persons for representation purposes but at the same time deny their Humanity by treating them as property well ultimately Roger Sherman of Connecticut secured support for the Three-Fifths clause which counted enslaved people as 3 fths of a person for congressional representation that was a formula that had come from a tax law from the 1770s and then there was the Fugitive Slave Clause there was little debate at

12:05the convention over the Claus's language but it granted southern slave holders the power to go to northern states to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped from enslavement so we've reviewed the three major compromises at the convention about slavery the um Banning of the international slave trade the 35th clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause so in the end even the delegates who refused explicitly to recognize their right to property and men were opened to protecting the existing property rights of slave holders and were willing to compromise with Southern slave holders in order to form the new Union but the ultimate status of slavery whether to permit it or to abolish it was left to Congress and the states while many in the founding generation predicted that slavery would eventually die out advances in technology like the invention of the cotton Jin by Eli Whitney made slavery

12:59more profitable and ensured its survival there was a debate after the convention about whether the Constitution affirmatively protected the rights of the enslavers as people like John Calhoun argued or whether it left it up to Congress and the states to determine the future of slavery as Lincoln argued and in many ways these debates culminated in the infamous Dread Scott decision at the Supreme Court and eventually in the Civil War itself let's review The Dread Scott Decision which came down in 1857 dread and Harriet Scott SC were enslaved people bought by enslaver into an area where slavery was banned and then returned to an area where slavery was permitted and the Scots sued for their freedom they argued that their time on Free Soil made them free it took 11 years for the lawsuit to get to the Supreme Court and we often focus on dread Scott's part of the story but

13:48let's take a moment to recognize the important role played by Harriet Scott she was an enslaved mother she had two young girls she didn't want them to live their lives as enslaved people so she pushed to bring the case to court and the Supreme Court eventually rejected the Scott's family claims and they did much more than that chief justice Roger Brooks Ton's Infamous opinion for the Supreme Court also struck down the Missouri Compromise and essentially said that Congress had no power to ban slavery even if it wanted to and Tony based that decision on a false historical claim that at the time of the founding African-Americans were not citizens uh based on this reading of constitutional history Tony concluded African-Americans couldn't be citizens and that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect so the Scots couldn't get into court to sue for their freedom because you had to be a

14:42citizen to get into federal court uh that was a bad enough ruling but the decision uh went even further the court went out of its way to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional attacking congress's power to ban slavery in the territories which was the core of the Republican party's constitutional and political platform essentially tnie was writing John C Calhoun's radically contested vision of a pro-slavery Constitution into the supreme law of the land but T's arguments didn't go unanswered he faced a pair of powerful dissenting opinions one by Justice Benjamin Curtis and the other by Justice John McLean Justice Curtis's descent used history to show that at the time of the founding five out of the 13 states did in fact allow for African-Americans to vote and consider them citizens so Curtis said as a matter of original understanding Justice T was simply wrong and then at

15:40the same time Justice McAn attacked the court for reaching out to curb the national government's power to ban slavery in the territories in response to the Dread Scott Decision Justice Curtis resigned from the Supreme Court in protest and leading Republicans including Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln Douglas debates vigorously criticized The Dread Scott decision and said he would have to apply the decision to the facts of the case as he was required to do but refused to recognize it as valid law in other cases in 1860 Lincoln was elected president and became the nation's first anti-slavery president this led to a wave of secession by enslaving states in the South and then as Lincoln said so memorably the war came the War began as a battle to preserve the union but as it progressed president President Lincoln recast the war's meeting as a battle to

16:31end slavery and he was pushed in that direction by African-American refugees abolitionists and voices in Congress the most famous example of this shift is Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation drawing on his War poers as President Lincoln issued the proclamation on January 1st 1863 Lincoln was a great lawyer as well as a great emancipator and he relied on his War Powers but he thought his War Powers only empowered him to free enslave people held within the Confederacy or within territories under military control this was a great advance for emancipation it was Unthinkable before this Civil War but at the same time it didn't free all enslaved people it didn't affect enslaved people held in the border states which remained loyal to Lincoln and the union like Maryland Delaware Kentucky and Missouri over time thousands of

17:23African-Americans signed up for the Union Army and laid claim to the promises of equal citizenship and African-Americans in convention before during and after the Civil War demanded their rights petition Congress for equal rights the same way Prince Hall did including rights of free speech religious freedom and the right to keep and bear arms and for the right to vote and after the bloodiest war in American history 23,000 dead are wounded at anti Edom President Lincoln and the union prevailed and after the Civil War the Constitution was finally transformed in its text forever and the Reconstruction amendments ratified after the Civil War the 13th 14th and 15th amendments inscribed the promise of the Declaration into the Constitution the 13th Amendment ratified in 1865 abolished slavery the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868 wrote the Declaration promise of freedom and

18:19equality into the Constitution it combined four big Ideas first Birthright citizenship the first sentence of the 14th Amendment overturns the dread Scott decisions and holds that African-Americans do have rights that white people are bound to respect that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state werein they reside Dread Scott is hereby overturned second equality the original Constitution is silent on the issue of equality now the Declarations promise that all men and women are created equal is written into the Constitution and indeed women's suffrage Advocates at Santa Falls invoke the promise of the Declaration and their Declaration of Sentiments to insist that the promise of the Declaration and the 14th Amendment apply to man as well as woman and third Freedom the original Bill of Rights was

19:10limited to abuses by the national government now the Constitution protects those from abuse uh in the United States by the states and applies the key rights of the Bill of Rights like free speech and religious liberty to the states and holds that the states as well as Congress can't infringe them and fourth National power over civil rights Congress has given the power to enforce the protections of the 14th Amendment and uh expands congress's ability to protect freedom and equality and finally our our third amendment is the 15th Amendment which is ratified in 1870 which promised to end racial discrimination in voting so we've seen how the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal was thwarted in the original Constitution resurrected by Lincoln and Frederick Douglas inscribed in the post Civil War amendments to the Constitution forwarded

20:06again after reconstruction and resurrected Again by Dr King on the Washington mall and in the I Have a Dream speech Dr King said when The Architects of our Republic wrote The Magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence they were signing a promisory note to which every American was to fall Heir this this note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness [Music]